Intermediality of Screens in Post-Media Assemblages

Abstract

In contemporary artworks of so-called post-media assemblage, screens can be argued to emphasize, interconnect and rearticulate relationships between various parts in various modalities of image-making and display. They can be understood to produce gesturality that maintains conditions of mediality, which is the sustenance of relations between different parts of the media ensemble. This paper is an attempt to understand screens by analysing the gesturality that they propagate and not just facilitate. For this purpose, the paper interrogates the intermediality of screens in contemporary media arts that rely on this gesturality. By closely analysing contemporary media art installations such as Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) (John Gerrard, 2014) and Shadow 3 (Shilpa Gupta, 2007), this paper elaborates a concept of intermediality as an unfixed state and describes in-betweenness as enabling an openness to continuously form, unform and deform relations with different entities, thereby producing a gestural modality.